Teaching academic English to Russian-speaking academic staff: the case of the office of academic writing

Staff members holding teaching positions, as well as postgraduate students, make up approximately the same percentage of the total number of attendees of academic writing courses, that is, about 12% in each group. This means

that these staff members also wish to continue their research and subsequently present it to the international scientific community.

The group of attendees who hold the positions of professors is the smallest part of the total number ofattendees - 5.07%. This can be explained by their great experience in foreign publication activities, on the one hand, and by a conservative attitude to the need of exchanging research results with the international community, on the other.

Importance of academic writing courses

Academic writing courses aim not only to familiarize authors with the publication requirements of foreign journals, but also to raise the level of their general academic literacy, including academic writing in Russian. Coherent expression of thoughts in a foreign language is impossible without the ability to correctly formulate them in the native language. Therefore, the OAW offers advanced training courses aimed at improving academic literacy in both Russian and English. pedagogical course academic writing

The programs implemented by the Office of Academic Writing in SUSU have been developed according to the methodological guidelines for preparing and formatting scientific articles in journals indexed in the international citation databases [11]. They involve materials of modern Russian and foreign manuals that help master the academic style of writing [12-16].

To date, OAW staff members have developed six advanced training programs. Each of them is developed for a certain set of attendees according to their priorities and level of English [8; 17].

1. English: a scientific paper.

The course workload is 72 hours. The course is provided in English. The main sections of the program are: the process of writing an article, scientific genres, the structure of a scientific article, lexical and grammatical features of the English scientific style, editing an article, and using the language for argumentation. The training results in practical work on writing an article in English and its editing.

2. English: the basics of academic literacy. Grammar and vocabulary.

The course workload is 72 hours. The course is provided in Russian and English. Within the framework of this program, course attendees study the process of writing an article, scientific genres, the structure of a scientific article, the basics of academic literacy, and lexical and grammatical features of the English scientific style. After completing the course, attendees translate a part of their research into English according to the rules of the scientific style (Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion, Compilation of Glossary).

3. English: introduction to writing a paper.

The course workload is 36 hours. The course is

provided in Russian and English. This program is intended for the attendees who have the minimum level of English. Attendees are familiarized with the process of writing an article, scientific genres, the structure of a scientific article, the content of each section, and the rules for composing a scientific text. Upon completion of the course, the attendees submit a scientific text written in Russian and structured according to the requirements of top rated foreign scientific editions.

4. English: scientific citation databases.

The course workload is 36 hours. The course

is provided in Russian and English. Within the framework of this program, course attendees are familiarized with academic databases, taught to identify the key information in English articles and analyze articles of a similar topic as well as choose journals for their publications.

5. English: publication strategy.

The course workload is 36 hours. The course is provided in Russian and English. Course attendees are familiarized with the concept of publication strategy, taught to define and develop their own publication strategies, familiarized with an opportunity to increase the number of citations of their publications. The course results in choosing journals for their publications.

6. English: training for tutors.

The course workload is 36 hours. The course is provided in English. The courses for tutor training consider the issues of providing counseling services to authors of scientific articles. In classroom, future tutors consider the problems encountered by authors and find the ways to solve them.

Having studied the number of attendees who completed a particular course, we can conclude about the most popular advanced training programs. Table 3 was made basing on the results of the study. It shows that 30.43% of the attendees completed the course “English: a scientific paper”, 27.91% - “English: the basics of academic literacy. Grammar and vocabulary”, and 15.58% - “English: introduction to writing a paper”.

The most popular programs were “English: a scientific paper” (72 hours) and “English: the basics of academic literacy. Grammar and vocabulary” (72 hours). This is due to their practical orientation and possibility to consider the details of writing a scientific paper in English on the basis of specific exercises.

In addition to full-time courses, the Office staff members developed trial versions of distance courses in academic writing, such as: “English: introduction to writing a paper” (developed by M. Chernysheva); “English: the basics of academic literacy. Grammar and vocabulary” (developed by E. Nenakhova and E. Donova); “English: a scientific paper” (developed by M. Tsytovich); “English: publication strategy” (developed by E. Nenakhova). Run-time versions of the above mentioned distance courses are available on the “Electronic SUSU” platform.

Fig. 1. Chernysheva M.A. English: introduction to writing a paper

The 36-hour introduction course in writing a paper was developed from January 2017 to March 2019. The content of the distance course was approved within the framework of two fulltime academic writing courses held in 2017 and 2018. Its attendees are members of the SUSU academic staff. Fig. 1 shows the distance course “English: introduction to writing a paper”.

The developed courses were not approved in their distance form because the funding of OAW educational services had been cut off (as of April 2019).

Conclusion

The results show that the academic writing courses imparted by the OAW at SUSU are most popular among associate professors of social- humanitarian and technical areas, i.e. those who have experience in publishing papers in Russian. More than 50% of the attendees opted for 72- hour practice-oriented programs that focus on the methodology for writing a scientific paper in English and improvement oflanguage skills.

Positive feedback received from the attendees through oral and written surveys, as well as their increased foreign publication activities point to the successful implementation of the training programs developed by the OAW. It is noteworthy that upon completion of the academic writing courses in the analyzed period the attendees submitted 94 papers to journals and conference proceedings indexed in the scientific citation databases Scopus and Web of Science. Many of them had the first experience of foreign publication activity. The Office of Academic Writing assisted the authors in translating papers into English and proof-reading them by a native English speaker. The attendees' publication results require more detailed consideration in a separate study.

In our opinion, teaching of academic writing to the academic staff of SUSU should go beyond these advanced training programs. We find it promising to develop courses in academic English for specific purposes. Such courses will allow Russian-speaking authors to focus their attention on terminology bases and to get familiarized with the specifics of foreign publication activities in the relevant research field in more detail.

References

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